Atlantic and Other Worlds: Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction

This essay traces the meanings and effects of postcolonial authors' recent refashioning of classical historical fiction. That refashioning has two aims: a materialist cartography that counters the nationalist vocation of classical historical fiction by revealing the supranational, global aspirations of colonial capitalism as a system; and an effort to retrieve from colonial modernity the residues of premodern, often presecular modes of solidarity that persist in yet lie athwart the colonial-modern. The analysis focuses on two novels: Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger (1992) and Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies (2006). It engages with work on the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, with theoretical critiques of utopia, and with the Lukacsian concept of typification (and Ian Baucom's criticism of it). The essay concludes by linking the birth of postcolonial historical fiction to the form of finance capital undergirding our contemporary moment a form of capital that reprises while intensifying that which held sway at the moment of historical fiction's first emergence.